I'm Down
by TrenchcoatsAreSexy
Summary: House discovers an unexpected ally while behind bars.
1. Chapter 1

I'm Down

Chapter One

"Is there some reason they decided to stick all of us girls on the late shift?" Ameka complained loudly as she reached up to spread her hand over a crease on her guard uniform. She and her three compatriots had two hours left in their overnight shift at Princeton Prison, and none of them would say that their shift ended a moment too soon. All four were African-American women in their early 20's, with black hair tied back in buns (so the inmates couldn't grab a hold if they were breaking up a fight), but beyond that the four were very different.

"Because whatever guys can do, girls can do better?" Ashley chimed in response. At twenty-four, she was the oldest of the group, and had soft curly hair and gentle features, which had led more than one inmate to declare that she ought to have been a model instead of a prison guard. Why she had opted for the latter job was still anyone's guess, but her bubbly personality tended to be an asset on long, irritating nights.

Ameka was a year younger than Ashley, a night student at Princeton University and smart as a whip, tall and beautiful with pronounced brown eyes that never met her smile. She had a three-year-old son at home, she'd mentioned, and if it weren't for him she would have quit this job long ago. She had the shortest fuse of any of them and had gone for the guard job after getting fired from more than one customer service gig for mouthing off to the customers.

Next was Victoria, or Vicki as she was usually known, twenty-two and a performing arts major who was working as a guard because it paid well and it was something to get her by until she made her big break in either the acting or the music scene. In short, it was an attempt to get her parents – who were very wealthy but had also with very high expectations – off her back.

The youngest was Leona, at twenty-one. Of them all, she was the only one who actually wanted this as a career. A Criminal Justice major at Princeton, she was light-skinned with dark brown eyes and a somewhat uneasy smile. She was the quietest of all the girls, and no one had really successfully managed to figure out exactly what made her tick.

"I hear we got a new 'guest' in here tonight," Ameka continued, ignoring Ashley's comment. "Some doctor."

"Oh, what'd he do?" Leona chimed in. "Prescribing too many drugs?"

"Nah…" Ameka replied. "Get this – he drove his car into his girlfriend's house after she broke up with him."

"Reminds me of Left-Eye Lopes!" Ashley said with a grin. "She lit her whole boyfriend's house on fire."

"That was on accident, though," Vicki cut in, taking a step forward to begin patrolling the aisle between the cells. "She was only trying to burn his shoes."

"That does not count as 'on accident'!" Ameka argued. "That's still burning a house down, whether you didn't mean to burn the whole damn house or not."

"Who try to burn her boyfriend's shoes, anyway?" a voice came out of the cell they were standing in front of, and a moment later a tall, bronze-skinned man with glasses appeared at the bars. "See, you women… Tsk." Ameka rolled her eyes.

"Raul, first of all it's 'tries' – you need to try and spruce up your grammar," she began, and the inmate scoffed. "Second of all, you're in here for trying to steal a BED out of Sears. You have no rights to call anyone else stupid. Get back in there." They continued past Raul's cell and past a few more, all of which contained men who were either sleeping or, in one or two cases, reading. It looked like it was set to be a pretty quiet night.

"So," Leona spoke up. "Tell me about this new doctor."

"You wanna know if he's fine?" Ameka teased. "Well, I don't know. I haven't seen him. He's probably old… and angry."

"Well, we know he no longer has a nice car," Ashley chimed in with a giggle. "I'd be SO angry if my boyfriend did that!"

"Yeah, me too," Ameka agreed. "I'd be in jail with him."

"No, you'd be in jail, he'd be in the morgue!" corrected Ashley with a chuckle. "Don't act like we don't know you by now!" The four continued gossiping quietly as they made their way to the end of the hall and then turned, walking up the next row. This tended to be a good amount of what they did, apart from leading prisoners to lunch and dinner on those days that they were switch to the day-shift. Night shift, on the other hand, tended to be glorified baby-sitting, as Ashley had stated more than once.

They were interrupted by the annoyingly loud sound of one of the prison's phones ringing, which more than one person had mistaken for a fire alarm, leading to a few nearly evacuations that had caused a lot more trouble than they were worth.

Ashley got to the phone first.

"Hello? Fisher here. Okay… Yeah, sounds great, I'll be right there." She hung up the phone and turned to the others. "They're bringing in the doctor guy, apparently." They walked up to the front entrance doors, where the prisoners were brought in at various points in the day – or, in this case, of the night.

"Why are they bringing him in the middle of the night?" Ameka asked. "Don't they usually bring them in after court." Leona shrugged.

"Could have been a long transport… Or maybe he had to detox at the hospital first? They do that a lot for people who come in on drug addictions, don't they?" she pointed out.

"Oh, you just want to convince yourself this doctor's a druggie," Ashley teased. "You don't think any sober person would drive a car into his girlfriend's house."

The door opened, and three guards entered, leading a cuffed prisoner who was hobbling along with great difficulty and was close to being carried more than led. Leona looked him over, her mouth forming a gasp as she looked at the stubbled face, blue eyes and tell-tale limp.

"Dr. Gregory House… for processing," said one of the guards, a broad-shoulder man with dirty blonde hair.

Leona felt her heart begin to beat out of her chest.

"Shit." She turned and looked at the others. "I need a break… I need to call somebody."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

"May I please speak to Dylan Crandall, please?" Leona's voice sang into the phone, trying to sound nonchalant. Crandall's secretary was on the other end – Jacqueline or Jeanne or something was her name, Leona couldn't remember. She could remember that she could not stand her.

"Who may I say is calling?" J-whatever-her-name-was asked in response.

"This is Leona."

"Leona?"

"His daughter." She emphasized the word, hissed it out, would have glared it if she could have. And legally, she was. Just because… well, she had found out later that what Dr. House had told her wasn't true, but that wasn't until years later.

Dr. House.

"Oh. I see. I'll get him." There was a long pause, and a few moments later, the secretary picked up again. "Mr. Crandall is meeting with a publisher right now, but I could have him call you back? Or you could try him again at home?" Unsaid implication: _go away._

Leona didn't tend to take kindly to being told to go away, particularly from Dylan, but she rolled over the thoughts in her mind. Maybe now wasn't the time to break this news to him – what could he do about it, anyway? It would only upset him. She would just have to deal with it on her own.

Her interactions with Dr. House weren't exactly cause for celebration; she still shuddered as she remembered him breaking her finger (Dylan had reminded her again and again, later, that it had been for a medical reason), accusing her of being a liar and a manipulator as he did.

At the time, she had wanted the man dead – but even more than that, she just wanted to never see him again.

Then the years had gone by; she was no longer the awkward teenager who narrowly escaped death in the aftermath of Katrina, the girl who lost everything she had and only started a new life with one little, huge lie. Now she was the woman, a young woman with a career – even if it sucked – and a head on her shoulders – one that she tried desperately to have rule her heart, instead of the other way around.

Now, House was in here, and she didn't know what to say to him, or if she should say anything at all. Maybe there was some kind of protocol; maybe someone wasn't supposed to be a guard when they knew someone in the prison.

_That's not quite true,_ she thought to herself, _I've heard stories of brothers on either side of the bars, cousins and friends. _

Whether it was legal or ethical, she didn't know, but apparently it did happen.

She had asked her father about House, about why he had ever been friends with the man. After all, they seemed so unlike one another – House was cutting and cynical, rude and arrogant, whereas Dylan Crandall was sweet to a fault, open and extremely gullible.

In retrospect, it was obvious that House must have cared for Crandall deeply.

Leona toyed with the sleeve on her uniform. Should she say something? What was there to say? "Hi, remember me? We met some time before you got arrested?" Seven years, in fact.

She was jerked out of her thoughts on this dilemma by a hand on her shoulder. She whipped around, for a second thinking that it had to be House grabbing her, even though that didn't make any sense in the world.

Of course it wasn't House; it was Ameka.

"Are you okay?" she asked, her brown eyes growing concerned. "I didn't mean to startle you. You rushed off so fast and then I couldn't find you!" Leona sighed and looked at her co-worker.

"Sorry… I just…" She smiled wanly and decided to just come out with it. What good would keeping the truth be this time? She had had to learn how to survive as a liar in those months after Katrina, to out-scam the other scam artists in order just to live another day. But she had never developed a taste for lying, never liked the sense of it in any way. "I kind of know that guy who just got arrested." There; that was vague enough – maybe it was. If this was unethical, if this was wrong somehow – well, there it was. It was out in the open now.

"Car guy?" Ameka raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes a little bit. "How? How the hell did you meet him?" Leona chuckled, thinking to herself that Ameka wouldn't believe her if she told him the whole crazy story. And there were parts of it that she didn't want to tell, didn't want to think about. She wasn't a person who really talked about where she came from, and none of her co-workers knew she was a Katrina survivor.

"I was sick a while ago," she replied vaguely. "He was my doctor, and it turned out he was a friend of my father's from college." Ameka looked doubly surprised.

"You've never mentioned your dad before," she pointed out. "What's he like?"

"Oh, he's… well… sweet," Leona replied, trying to find a fitting adjective. "He's friendly. He likes everybody."

"Even people who drive their cars into their girlfriends' houses?" Ameka inquired.

"Yeah, apparently," Leona said, "I can't believe it." She thought about it for a moment, shuddered as she remembered not what it felt like to have House break her finger, but the cold rage in his eyes as he'd done so. The vengeance there against a foe who was hurting his friend.

"What are you going to do?" Ameka asked.

It was a good question: what WAS she going to do?

Did she want to help Dr. House, or to hurt him? To be in his corner for her father's sake, or his antagonist for her own? Could she let all of that shit go?

Leona didn't like this. She didn't like it at all.

Ameka waited a few moments and then repeated the question, thinking maybe Leona hadn't heard: "What are you going to do?"

Leona resolved to give an answer when she figured it out.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Leona decided that she should talk to Dr. House. About ten steps away from his cell, she thought better of it, decided it was, in fact, a horrible idea, and walked back to where she had been standing, only to reconsider her reconsideration and walk back to his cell again.

From where she was standing, she could see House, but he could not see her. This was a good vantage point. It came in handy for being able to spy on prisoners who were up to no good, or, in this case, consider her next move.

Once she opened her mouth, after all, there was no going back.

"Hey," she called out, and she saw House jerk up, able to hear her voice but not yet to see her. She stepped out, right foot first, so as not to be some creepy disembodied voice coming out of the shadows. "Remember me?"

House stared at her.

"Can't say that I do." She rolled her eyes.

"Leona Baker." Still nothing. "Leona _Crandall_."

"Oh. Of course," House replied. "Little Miss Fraud."

"Yeah, that's me," Leona shot back, her voice coming out angrier than she had expected it to. "Except I'm not so little anymore."

"Still got Crandall wrapped around your finger?"

"Always," Leona mumbled. "But I'm not here to talk about me." She stuck one hand in her pocket and sighed. What _was_ she there to talk about? Why had she approached him and not just continued on, kept doing her job like she was supposed to? Why didn't she just let the damn thing go? "Why did you do it? Run your car into your ex-girlfriend's house?" House shrugged and looked at her with an infuriatingly cheekish look.

"Seemed like a good idea at the time."

"You're a pain in the ass, you know that? I don't know why my father was your friend."

"Because he's a gullible idiot; that's the same reason why he took your little story at face value."

Leona stepped forward, her face flushing red.

"You told me that he was my father."

"I lied. Just like you." Leona glared, locked eyes with the prisoner. She could imagine drawing her nightstick, pulling him out, saying he'd tried to attack her and then beating him senseless.

The mental image was not an unwelcome one.

Leona took a deep breath, held it, heard a voice, a calming one: the Better Leona, she liked to call it; it was kind of like an angel on her shoulder that drowned out the devil on the opposite one.

The Better Leona was reminding her that she had gone into this profession to help people, to help the people that society had given up on. The prisoners, after all, were the most lost of the lost. They needed to be given some kind of second chance, just the way she had been given a second chance when Dylan Crandall had taken her in.

Not-quite-so-good-Leona, however, the devil on her shoulder, was telling her that she ought to slug the prick.

Better Leona, thankfully for all involved, won out.

"Forget it, Dr. House," she snapped at him. "Just do your time and then get out of her and don't do it again." She paused and sighed before adding, "I'll tell my _dad_," she emphasized the word as she glared at him, "that you said 'hey'."

She turned and walked, not looking back. How the hell was she supposed to deal with him? Maybe she really should have reported it, stated that it was a conflict of interest, but that would have more likely resulted in her being transferred than House getting sent somewhere else.

"How was your reunion?" The voice came seemingly out of nowhere, and Leona jumped, pressing a hand to her heart. When the owner of the disembodied voice turned out to only be a smirking Ameka, she glared.

"You don't need to sneak up on me!" she exclaimed.

"You must be always on your guard – or he will catch you, with his magical lasso!" Ameka teased. Leona rolled her eyes and continued walking. "So, seriously though, how did it go? I knew you'd go over and say something."

"It didn't go well," Leona replied, still walking.

"Okay, what happened?" her friend continued, "You should know by now that I don't give up all that easily."

"You don't give up at all," Leona grumbled.

"That's my point. So spill it or I'll bug you all day." Leona sighed, stopped, and whirled around.

"Things between myself and Dr. House didn't maybe go as well as I said before," she ventured finally. "At the time, I had just met my dad. I didn't know he was my dad for… ages, my whole life up 'til then. House was suspicious."

"Suspicious how? That you weren't really his friend's kid?"

"Yeah," Leona murmured. It sounded stupid said like that, it sounded like it was totally reasonable said like that – she wouldn't want her friend, or her boyfriend if she had one, getting played for a fool by someone who claimed to be their child. But at the time, and still burnt into her mind, was the thought that things had been perfect until House had shown up and tried to ruin it all.

But that, of course, wasn't true – she'd have never encountered House at all if she hadn't gotten sick, and she wouldn't have gotten sick if she hadn't hid out in the studio…

Everything would have gone to shit regardless, even if House hadn't been there. In fact, things would have gone more to shit if House hadn't been there… She might have died. Hell, she _would_ have died.

But how could she reconcile that with the pounding rage she felt when she thought of the man? And how could she reconcile that with whatever else she kept thinking; that idea that maybe he needed a friend on the inside? A protector?

"Leona," Ameka called, but her voice didn't come through. Things had gotten more twisted in knots than she could have ever imagined.


End file.
